can microsoft still throw a GDID on a linux machine if you sign into a microsoft account while on linux? maybe not as powerful as on windows, but still as a unique identifying cookie or something?

No.

If you run their software, yeah they can fingerprint your device. That includes if you visit their websites — it’s completely feasible to take a deterministic reading of various unique qualities of your machine that can be used to later identify your device as the same device in another circumstance. That doesn’t inherently provide lineage to anything identifying you, but it can easily lead to something.

Unless you have a very unique device, I imagine it’s not possible to do this posthoc with standard data collection from web traffic. You’d need to be intentionally doing this beforehand for it to be reliable.

Though… I wonder if there are certain softwares where telemetry can reasonable be used to fingerprint a device. Maybe a browser like Edge — though, who’s using Edge on Linux lol?

I would not be surprised if they used minecraft for it, which is why I had my initial concern/question.

Its probably got a larger install base than any non-corporate microsoft product outside of an OS. Which would make it a fantastic snooping tool

Telemetry is usually non-identifiable (by law if your country follows GDPR).

This form if ID is also pretty circumstantial. That might fly for advertisers but in a court of law I have my doubts.

If you allow everything and all cookies most things are possible in theory. In practice most distros are secure enough and most users savvy enough to not accept everything blindly that it probably doesn’t happen.

Yes, they can. Every computing device has an ID similar to Windows GDID. You can see yours in Linux with “cat /etc/machine-id”. If I am not mistaken, it changes when you install another distros, but I’ve never checked. Now, since there is a machine ID, using Microsoft services are highly likely to grab that ID, but I am not certain that would happen, I’m just guessing it does, because Microslop. In any case, my suggestion is to remain away from any big tech bullshit as much as your needs will allow.

cat /etc/machine-id

That’s a machine ID, GDID is Winblows exclusive. And in my case, I don’t use any big tech crap, so I’m sure that, even if they could get it, they can’t do shit with my machine ID either. I can always nuke my system, reinstall Fedora, and BOOM! new machine ID.